Articles from Working In These Times

While the nation was focused on Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation process, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira, a major labor case that could impact thousands of workers throughout the country. The Court will determine whether workers in the hyper-exploitive trucking industry can sue their bosses for breaking the law. The case will now be heard by a conservative majority, including Kavanaugh, who has a long history of anti-worker decisions.

On Tuesday, the music stopped for the Lyric Opera of Chicago just as the company began its 64th season. Orchestra members walked out on strike over a new proposed contract that would cut pay, reduce membership and performances, and cancel radio broadcasts.

Nearly 80 percent of American adults are either clinically overweight or obese. And yet the medical establishment by and large has subscribed to the idea that the best solution is to simply make people lose weight.

Earlier this week Amazon announced a $15 an hour minimum wage for its employees in the United States. As Amazon's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos acknowledged in a statement, the decision was at least in part an address to “critics”: The company “thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead.

Twenty-eight days into the largest hotel strike Chicago has seen in a century, about 1,000 workers with UNITE HERE Local 1 have won a new contract at the Hyatt—the last major holdout after several other hotels in the city already settled with the union in recent weeks.

Last month, Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith argued that Sanders’s recent agitation against Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, specifically his “Stop BEZOS Act,” “seems to be much more about grandstanding and pointing fingers than about actual solutions to help vulnerable American workers.”

Across Latin America, soccer is like a religion for many. Each weekend, fans cram into stadiums to cheer on their teams. Eduardo Galeano, the renowned Uruguayan author and outspoken fan of soccer who passed away in 2015, once declared that soccer was “the only religion without atheists."

After being called out by labor activists and progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders for paying poverty wages despite receiving tax breaks and raking in billions of dollars, Amazon has caved to the pressure and announced it will offer all its workers a $15-per-hour minimum wage starting next month.

Erik Loomis’ "A History of America in Ten Strikes" is a powerful reminder of the need for worker militancy.

Workers’ power is rooted in the work we do and our occasional refusal to do it. But, until recently, that refusal had become rare: Work stoppages have declined to historically low levels over the past four decades.